The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 307: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

276 REYNOLDS’ WORKS glossy hair arranged in bands, and she herself perhaps the least meretriciously attired of the whole four, looking, too, more sweetly and pensively lovely, though lovelier as to actual charms she was not, for it were impossible to award the palm to any one in particular, — Armantine, we say, was placed in a settee near the German girl, with whom she principally conversed. In a large, cushioned chair languishingly reclined the third of these sirens,— a full-grown beauty, though still quite youthful, and with all the freshness of youth blooming upon her rich, luxuriant charms. ‘There was an air of sensuous indolence about this girl which was different from that of the German; it was the waking dreaminess of a luxurious temperament that appeared to be softly abandoning itself to voluptuous reveries. She was a native of England, and had only recently passed from the keeping of a nobleman — who first seduced her from a genteel and happy home — into Madame Angelique’s fashionable temple of infamy. But no remorse had she on account of the home she had left, — or at least, if such a feeling were really in her bosom, she displayed it not, for blended with that air of sensuous lassitude — an air which might be described as luxurious wantonness at rest — was an expression of listless, placid contentment. She had light hair and blue eyes; milk and roses combined to form her complexion; she had full, moist, luscious lips, beautiful teeth, and a form which without being exuberant to fatness, was full, fleshy, but of perfectly symmetrical proportions. She answered to the Christian name of Marion. Upon the back of the chair in which Marion thus negli- gently reclined — or, rather, in which she reposed — leaned a tall, slender girl, of sylphid shape, and with such exquisite elegance and grace in all her attitudes and movements that in the days of her virtue she must have been a veritable star in the midst of the brightest galaxy that ever thronged in a ballroom. She had brown hair, remarkably luxuriant in its mass of silken softness, and with a rich natural gloss upon it. Her features were perfectly faultless; her age did not exceed seventeen. She also was an English girl, and she bore the beautiful name of Eglantine. Alas, that one endowed with such loveliness of form and with such mental accomplish- ments as she possessed, bearing, too, a name so sweet to be murmured by the lips of pure, chaste, and honourable love, CORMICLIOO KS (E(0)